Habit Forming

After seeing Janet’s bowl paintings last weekend I was inspired (or hit with a brick – you decide) to emulate (you say “copy,” I say potato) the more abstract backgrounds that she had done instead of putting every bowl in an exact setting. I’d done this with the small oil painting but was inspired to do more. So I came home and painted over a couple of old pictures that hadn’t worked. The problem was that I liked the new backgrounds so much I didn’t want to paint anything over them. But they cannot stand alone as abstracts so at some point I’ll have to bite the bullet.

Anyway, I went to Chris’s studio yesterday and we worked on some figure drawing a la Bill Buchman and had lots-o-fun. Nancy joined us for the afternoon. She brought some adorable chicken figurines which she did a painting of, Chris kept working on figures and I went back to painting backgrounds, this time from scratch on some gessoed paper I had. I did one other kind of abstract thing mostly trying to use up the Dr. Ph Martin Bombay India ink we’d been using for the figures. Interesting but nnnnnnnnnnnno. So today I painted over that and made a cool background (what is the definition of addiction?). But this time I didn’t give myself a chance to get attached to it. I just started in on bowl #6 Acrylic on paper 11×15

This one is my favorite so far.

In other news I have signed up for the BIG Fearless Painting Adventure workshop which begins July. It’s about painting…BIG. I’ve wanted to take this for a couple of years so I’m happy the timing finally worked out. One concern was how to set up to paint BIG. Because, though painting a full sheet of watercolor paper is big for me, (and something I’ve never even done!) I want to go REALLY BIG…or at least have the opportunity. I have a 4’x8′ piece of ply wood that I used to use as a table top but didn’t want to use that. I worried that if something happened and it fell it might hit one of the cats. So today I went on a mini quest and found just the ticket: roofing insulation! Super light weight but rigid, and…BIG! It too is 4’x8′. I don’t know if I can use push pins to hold paper as the foam (which isn’t styro) may not be dense enough to hold the pins. But it has a paper cover on both sides so I may be able to just tape the paper which would be fine. It’s called R-Max and comes in various widths. So if you’ve been looking for something to hold those larges pieces, check it out. I think I can even rig it to hold large canvases. As for what will hold it, for now I’m just planning on leaning it against the wall.

Here you can see what it looks like in the back of my pickup. The paper is actually a shiny silver.

Well, speaking of, I guess I’d better bring it in the house and give the cats something to oo and ah over.